UCLA historian who made important contributions to art history.
Ginzburg was born to Leone Ginzburg (1909-1944) and Natalia Levi (Ginzburg)
(1916-1991). His father was a
professor of Russian co-founder the publishing firm Einaudi; his
mother became one of Italy's leading writers. During World War II, his father's anti-Fascist stance
resulted in police harassment and a forced relocation from their home in
Turin to a village in the Abruzzi. After the fall of Mussolini in 1943, his father,
a Jew, was arrested by the Nazis, who had taken over Italy, for publishing an underground newspaper.
He was
beaten to death by the Gestapo in 1944. Carlo was hidden by his only non-Jewish relative under
the name Carlo Tanzi. After the war, his mother married Gabriele Baldini (1919-1969) in 1950, a professor of
English literature. Ginzburg attended one of Italy's most prestigious secondary
schools, the Scuola Normal Superiore in Pisa before entering the University of
Pisa where he received a Doctor of Letters in 1961. He was appointed assistant
in modern Italian history at the University of Rome. Ginzburg visited the Warburg Institute, London
as a fellow in 1964. In 1966 he emerged as an
innovative historian with his book, I benandanti, (translated into
English initially as an article in a collection of essays in 1969 and later as
the book Night Battles), a book documenting witches as practitioners of an ancient fertility religion
in the sixteenth century. The publication of
the practice of the benandanti, or "good walkers" set Ginzburg up as a major innovative
cultural historian. In 1970 he moved to the University of Bologna as
professor of modern history, but by 1973 was in the United States as a visiting
professor at Princeton University. He followed this with a visiting fellowship at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1975, the first of two times. In 1979 Ginzberg and the art historian Enrico Castelnuovo published
a discussion of "center and periphery" in the history of Italian art. A Yale University visiting fellowship followed in 1983 before his
second Institute for Advanced Study fellowship in 1986. He was appointed
Franklin D. Murphy Professor of Italian Renaissance Studies at the University of
California, Los Angeles in 1988. He was awarded a Getty Center visiting
fellowship and one at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris. In 1992 he
was awarded the Aby Warburg Prize. Between 1996 and 1997 he was a
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Berlin, followed by an Italian Academy for
Advanced Study on America, Columbia University, New York, in 1998.

Ginzburg married for a second to Luisa Ciammitti, a curator at the National
Museum of Art in Bologna, and a research associate for 18th-century Italian
documents in the Getty Center's in Malibu, California.

As an historian,
Ginzburg researched myths, customs and court records (the Inquisition), to trace
a history of common people through, in some cases, the most modest of facts.
Together with the historians Robert Darnton and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie the
formed a group working on the "history of mentalities." His worked
incorporated anthropology, psychology, literary analysis and linguistics as well
as other disciplines into a cohesive history.

Home Country: Italy

Sources: Kandell, Jonathan. "Was the World Made Out of Cheese?"
[biographical portrait] New York Times, November 17, 1991, p. 45